I dream each night, long and winding dreams that string me along, taking me through many structures, along roads and pathways, through intimate and public settings alike. I encounter people I know and people I’ve never met. Sometimes I’m an observer, sometimes I participate, sometimes I’m all parts of the dreaming self, the dream and dreamer alike.

I dream with the intent of training my awareness, my greater intention to be alert at the moment of death so that my time in the bardos may be limited, so that I may swiftly make my way through that state of dreaming and onto what comes next without getting caught. I’m also interested in learning as much as I can now, about the human potential beyond the mind and body. And so each night I set my intent to remain alert, to wake up in my dreams and remind myself that I’m dreaming, and to be proactive in my dreams.

This process of dream intent and training really began during my recapitulation, as I found myself able to tackle issues and do things that I could not ordinarily do in real life, everything from simply saying no to defending myself with masterful moves and extraordinary powers. I learned how to hone such skills, gradually daring myself to go beyond my normally passive and asleep self in real life too, being as fully awake and as powerful as I was in my dreams. As this powerful dream self eventually spilled over into real life, I grew into a new person as a result of the work I was doing in dreaming, complementing my recapitulation work so nicely

I began to understand that everything I was dreaming was part of the bigger picture of my recapitulation process and my life as a whole, and that my transformation was directly linked to all that I was doing in both waking and dreaming life, and so I took dreaming very seriously. As I found myself doing things in dreaming that I could not ordinarily do as a human being, I began to value the work, more eager to hone a supple energy body, for I saw that it offered a deeper understanding of the meaning of life itself.

Training our awareness is a gradual process, but a good first step is to begin each night as we are on the verge of going off to sleep by simply stating: “I intend to remain aware during dreaming.” Since we all dream anyway, this may be all it takes to begin honing the skills of awareness that will lead us to transformation, now, and later at our time of transition from this life.

Just as the signs and synchronicities in life may not at first be clear, so are dreams sometimes unclear, their meaning unapparent for days. At other times, they are immediately significant and helpful. Part of training to be a good dreamer is to sit with what we return from dreaming with long enough for its truth to be revealed. If we gloss over or forget—allow a dream to be too complicated or confusing to interpret or know on a deeper level—we limit ourselves. So part of the training involves doing inner work around the messages we receive in our dreams, to keep them in our awareness. As we work on this during waking hours, keeping our dream messages alive, our dreaming self gains strength as well. As we hone our energy body in dreaming, we begin taking back our personal energy too, making it available for use in this world as well.

We all go to sleep each night. We all dream each night. We all wake up each morning and reenter the life we live in reality. We see these two worlds—night and day, dreaming and sleeping—as so separate, but really they aren’t. They’re two sides of the same coin. We are the coin and both sides are us. The challenge is to meld them, to make them one flowing life. That’s how to become aware.

Dreaming all the time,
Jan